


Antihero

by KathKnight



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bad Taste, Gen, Humor, Religious Humor, The Author Regrets Nothing, The drivel I come up with during lockdown, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24455539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathKnight/pseuds/KathKnight
Summary: When you flip burgers nine-to-five, it’s pretty sweet being a truly benevolent master.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Antihero

There’s no easy way of putting this: I’m a god.

Well, not _the_ god, obviously. I’m just a guy. You’ve seen me, I’m basically an idiot. I’m the dude in the supermarket queue who’s staring off into space, thinking about the Dolphins-Thunder game on Fox and how to three-sixty-pop-shove it on the skate ramp without face-planting, and if it’s my turn to scrub the john and… not much, really. Garbage in, garbage out. There’s nothing holy about scraping out grease traps five days a week and wondering what else you’re supposed to do with your life. And you definitely don’t brag to your mates that you’re a Supreme Being. Shit like that sends you straight to the loony bin.

But anyway, here goes nothing.

The key element here is size difference. If the Cthulhu can be conjured up by humans who are so far beneath it, why can’t humans be summoned by ants? The answer is, they should be.

It was sometime during pre-season when they first trundled into the unit. 

At first it was just the odd ant here and there. Unobtrusive, easily ignored. But before I knew it they’d multiplied into a great celebratory procession marching out the kitchen sink, across the rec room, under the door and back outside. There, they dispersed and flowed like an oil spill into mounds of soil dotted all over the pavement. 

Landlord said it was our problem - but exterminators get expensive, so the thankless task of getting rid of them fell to me. I tried anything I could lay my mitts on at Walmart. They’d deviate around dustings of insecticide, bypass ant baits, and immediately repopulate everywhere I doused with Bug-B-Gon. Whoever suggested mixing baking soda with raw sugar was an idiot - little smartasses cherry-picked out every granule they wanted, carting it back to home base and leaving the rest for me to clean up.

Creepy-crawlies in the bed are _not_ cool. Even if my bong-smoking hippie of a housemate exhorts that all life is precious or some such crap. 

Long story short, I was getting desperate. 

It goes without saying that if a bunch of ants forms a circle in your rec room you’d certainly notice, try to figure out where they’d all come from, and wreak destruction there. 

But back to the Cthulhu. This is why knowing and correctly pronouncing the true name is so crucial to the ritual: imagine how impossible it would be not to go take a look if the circle of ants suddenly started chanting your name. 

And they were like, “Hail, O Lord Almighty, we summon thee with a line of sacred crystals – and thus beseech thee to bestow upon us a great favour.” The carpet underfoot was blanketed with grains of yellow sand laid out in what looked disturbingly like a pentagram. Fan-frickin’-tastic. Our landlord was going to crap his pants. 

So I was all, okay, let’s see where this goes. “Uh… hi,” I managed.

 _“The lord hath spoken!”_ came the ecstatic reply. “Let us rejoice!”

With that, their collective voices rose up in song. Maybe I’d sculled one too many Luckies last night or inhaled too much second-hand joint-smoke. Else I was in mental vapour lock. Their chorus was something never meant for human ears, a tinny whine with the staccato backbeat of exoskeletons whipping or mandibles clicking or whatever the hell they do. Like a swarm of bees on helium. Enough to send a man batshit crazy. 

“What’s the favour?” I interrupted, more to shut them up than anything else.

And so it began.

Their benedictions were always pretty basic: “Smite this one ant for us,” or, “Bless us with a pile of glucose.”

That’s right, it wasn’t just once. Why they ordained _me_ as their goddamn messiah and not the flower child across the hall who hadn’t showered in a year and hoarded chakra crystals and loved all creatures across Jah’s green earth remains a mystery. Day one, I squashed their offending ant on the pavement because... well, why not? It’s not like it was hard, and boy, was this going to be one riveting frigging story to tell one day over a few beers, these frigging ants chanting my name and wanting a spoonful of sugar or whatever. 

By the next time that telltale buzz came wafting up the hall, I’d decided the whole thing was a leftover-kung-pao-chicken-induced dream. If you’re dumb enough to eat it, you deserve to suffer. MSG mixed with a healthy dose of _E. coli_ makes the perfect hallucinogen, right? 

Ha ha. Nope. 

This time the whole floor was strewn with dirt arranged into ancient runes, and there they all were: my ardent little drove of groupies, chanting in unison, obviously expecting me to perform some menial task before dustbusting up all evidence of their tribute. _Again._ It was shagpile carpet, for crying out loud. 

Same deal, day after day. The congregation (which, thankfully, quit milling around the sink in between praises of thanksgiving) would ask for something that took near zero effort on my part. I would be all, yeah whatever – just stay outta my bed and piss off before rent inspection, capiche? And stop dragging the whole effing backyard inside already. And then they’d be all, _O Great Englebert, thou art a truly benevolent master._

When you flip burgers nine-to-five, it’s pretty sweet being a truly benevolent master.

Another evening it was _Prithee, Lord, let there be light!_ I flicked a switch, and there was light. And it was good. 

Turns out though, even omnipotence has its limits. Sometimes I’d get asked for stuff I couldn’t really do. Around a fortnight in, for instance, one stupid lovelorn drone was like: “Alas, my beloved queen refuses to pay me any attention. Please, King of Kings, in thine infinite wisdom, make her enamoured of me.”

And I was all… um, …how? 

I mean, what makes a good bug aphrodisiac? I’m no entomologist. Anything from the drugstore I ground up would probably be a lethal dose for an insect. Maybe what they needed was beer-goggles, teeny ant-sized ones. Rum, perhaps? Liqueur syrup? Hell, was I playing cupid here or trying to incite some sort of wanton ant-orgy? 

With great power comes great… well, you know.

So after careful consideration, I wasted the whole colony except for the two of them – funnelled Buggslayer down ant holes between pavers, spritzed trundling lines with Nuke-Em like terrible acid rain, stomped on any outliers. Job done. It was just like recreating the twelve plagues of Egypt: ridiculously easy. By that stage, the novelty of being at the beck and call of our house pests was really starting to wear thin. Even without vacuuming up their tributes.

I was convinced I’d eradicated them for good until later in front of the tube, when I heard the drone’s mortified whisper: _“Oh God, what have I done?”_

And I was all like, yeah, li’l dude, be careful what you wish for. 

(Truth be told, I knew I’d screwed up. Better not to fixate on what can’t be changed. But we sailed through rent inspection that week - no problemo.)

Anywho. There’s nothing like annihilating an entire legion of your worshippers to instil fear and subservience in the next generation. 

Point is, don’t go invoking some Lovecraftian monster or whatever demon you think might spice up your next frat party, because heaven knows - if you happen to get the incantation exactly right, they just might rock on up out of boredom and crush you all like bugs. Trust me. And please tread carefully. Try not to squash my devotees, okay? No-one except me gets to rain down the apocalypse for shits and giggles.


End file.
